


and the beat goes on and on and on and on

by silklace



Category: The Libertines
Genre: M/M, References to Drugs, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 14:19:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18523300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silklace/pseuds/silklace
Summary: He doesn't think he's asleep when it happens.





	and the beat goes on and on and on and on

**Author's Note:**

> This is a quick little blob of prompt-fic for anon who requested Peter/Carl + "I never want this to end." It got a bit long and sweary for a text post on tumblr, so popping it on here first.

He doesn’t think he’s asleep when it happens. He’d been teetering on the edge of it – that soft spot between going under and staying afloat, and he’d been listening to the rain coming hard enough to hit the window panes sideways and the slow, deep breathing next to him. Carl’s hand was just very gently touching the curl of his back. He was not yet asleep, but he would be soon.

So, it’s a bit of a surprise when, eyes fluttering open muzzily, he looks up into what is undoubtedly his own face – only. Not exactly. His own face but rounded out with age and surrounded by a truly incorrigible shag of grey hair. There are faint crow’s feet around his eyes that he does not remember seeing last time he looked in the mirror, which granted, might not have been all that recently. The bathroom mirror is spidered with cracks from where Carl punched it in a fit of cocaine pique about 6 months ago, and no one’s thought to replace it since. 

Old-Pete sits in a chair he’s pulled up next to the bed and flipped backwards. He’s resting his chin on his forearms, watching and not saying much. 

“I haven’t been tripping,” he blurts out, before he can think of anything else to say. 

Old-Pete wrinkles his nose. Now, Peter can see it’s not him he’s watching but Carl, coiled in the bed behind and with his face half-buried in the pillow. _Don’t fucking look at him_ , he wants to say, but he catches it in his teeth. 

Old-Pete looks over at him. “Liar. You nicked shit from Fat Roger just last week, I know you did.”

“I’m fucking dreamin’ or this is like a really, really un-fucking-fair trip.”

Old-Pete shrugs, looking unconcerned. “One or the other.” His eyes slide back over to Carl. Outside somewhere, a car door slams shut. The rain is relentless on the roof. 

“Fucking hell, I hope I don’t look half as bent and soppy-faced when I look at him as you do now.”

Old-Pete’s eyes flick back over to him, and he smiles. It’s not a friendly smile. “You do.” An eye-tooth blinks back at Peter, wolfish. “And everyone knows it, don’t they?”

Peter feels a muscle flexing in his jaw, in time with the staccato of his angry heartbeat. “What the fuck would you know? You’re some piece of shit fragment of my brain, what the fuck would you even –”

“Mate, you’re like, 21,” Old-Pete interrupts him, “and just had your brain sucked out your cock by someone who looks back at you like you hang the fuckin’ moon, so there’s really no accounting for your shirty fucking mood with me right now, but,” he says, and here he makes an expansive gesture with his hand as if to say, _See how fucking generous I am being right now,_ “I’ll cut to the fucking quick, then, alright? This -,” he says, and he wags one finger between the two of them on the bed, "it’s a really good thing. You know it, though for some reason you don’t want to look it in the face right now. But you know it. He doesn’t, of course.”

Peter shivers, a dredge of something icy curling up the base of his spine and running hoarfrost fingers along the back of his neck. He moves back an inch in bed, until he can feel the heat from Carl’s body again. 

“Anway, you fuck it up,” Old-Pete says, as if he’s commenting on the weather. He looks away from the pair of them. “Yeah, you fuck it royally up.”

“What are you talking about?” Somewhere between his voice box and his mouth the words go small and bitter. 

“You. fuck. it. up,” Old-Pete says, enunciating each word carefully as if he’s talking to someone especially dim-witted. “You’ve a knack for it.” 

“No, I don’t.” Last week, they’d finished a gig at some pit of a bar and afterwards Carl had pushed him against the alley way in between loading their gear into the hatchback of someone’s borrowed car and kissed him. Peter could feel the brick biting into his shoulders and Carl had said, “You are fucking electric to me,” and kissed him again. “That’s – no. I wouldn’t do that.”

Old-Pete smiles again, though this one’s less teeth-baring and mostly sad.

“Don’t fucking look at me like that, you don’t know shit. I – wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”

Old-Pete doesn’t say anything. 

“Tell me how, if you’re so – if you’re so sure. Tell me what I do.”

Old-Pete considers him. “You’re cleverer than I remember.” He shakes his head. “But, alas, that’s not how this goes, you see - you’ve already done it."

Peter bites his lip. Horribly, his throat feels tight – like a stone is caught in it. “I don’t – I don’t want this to end. I never wanted it to end. He’s – the best thing that I am.”

Old-Pete is watching Carl again. “I know.” After a minute, he flicks his gaze back over to Peter and says, “Jesus, you look like misery cooked over.” Peter wipes his hand over his face where it’s gone all wet. “Well, I’ll tell you this: the bad news, right? You lose him. You fuck it up and he’s – he does a runner, like he’s been threatening to do since you met him, right? The good news though? You get him back.”

“Fuck,” Peter says, in this voice that’s shivery and damp. “I do?”

“Yeah, well,” Old-Pete rubs the back of his neck. “Not – uh. Not like this. You get him back, just – not like this. Not ever again. This – you get to have just the once.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, rather tragic, isn’t it? But we do love a tragedy, so.” He slaps his palms on his thighs and stands as if he’s made some sort of closing remark, instead of leaving everything hacked open and unfinished. 

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Old-Pete says, and turns on the spot, shivering into nothing. 

In the bed, Carl makes a soft, searching kind of noise. “You weeping?”

Peter drops back into the open shell of space carved out for him. “No,” he says, sniffling. He drags himself closer until his nose is touching Carl’s collarbone. One of Carl’s hands trips up the ladder of his spine. He makes a shuffling sigh and runs his cheek against Peter’s temple. 

“Sad boy. You being a sad boy,” he says, words slurry with sleep, “instead of taking a nap with me?”

Peter swallows. His eyes won’t stop leaking. “M’not,” he says, and wonders, horribly, if this goes away, too – the sweetness with each other that they won’t – daren’t – show to anyone else. 

“Bad dream,” he says, finally, more of an exhalation than anything else, and lets Carl, in response, shift him closer, slide his thigh between his own so that Peter’s draped over him, liquid and on top of him. “You weren’t in it.”

Carl makes a sleepy noise of protest, rounding his palm over the knob of Peter’s spine, rolling his hips up to meet Peter’s in a way not meant to start anything but just for the easy roil of pleasure it brings. “Fuck tha’,” Carl murmurs. He tightens his hold on Peter, just once, a quick squeeze that has Peter’s face going wet again. “I’m here now.”

“Say it again.”

Carl sighs, a sweet noise in the close, dark bedroom. “Here now, love.”

“Yeah,” Peter says, and holds on for as long as he can.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! All feedback/comments treasured!


End file.
